“PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year,” the website reports.  But as Peter Suderman at Reason.com points out:

If you want to point out that the GOP stretched this one, then by all means go ahead. The PPACA [HR 3590] wasn’t strictly a government takeover of the entire health care system. No, it was just a dramatic increase in government regulation, oversight, and control of many parts of the system.

Suderman then reviews the increases in regulation, which Grace-Marie Turner nicely lists in her Washington Examiner article, and concludes:

So no, it’s not a gub’mint takeover. It’s just pretty damn close.

Meanwhile, our rigorous team of fact-checkers even introduce a misleading statement of their own when they claim that “the law Congress passed…relies largely on the free market.”

The only way this is true is if you utterly fail to distinguish between the concepts of “the free market” and “a highly regulated private sector,” which is a far more accurate description of what the health care law relies on to accomplish its goals.

Read the whole article: Politifact’s Lie of the Year Is An Exaggeration With Elements of Truth.

There’s a big difference between a free market and a highly regulated market.  Why do people conflate the two?  I mean, there’s a market for illegal products like cocaine, and people call it a “black market.” They don’t confuse it with a free market.

Read Grace-Marie Turner’s article, “Obamacare is a government takeover.” She lists “10 reasons why [people] are right that it is a government takeover of health care.”